The background image that was used in Jim Berg’s Publisher’s Note is a scan of the Marine Corps emblem tattoo on Jim Berg’s left shoulder.

By Jim Berg

It has been said that the ultimate rite of womanhood is childbirth, and the ultimate rite of manhood is war. While this may or may not be true, it is a belief that I no longer abide by. But this hasn’t always been the case. It was something of an avocation throughout the beginning of my adult life to seek the opportunity to kill another man.

My ideas of manhood were born of late-night war movies. Late on Saturday night in my formative years I watched the Johnny Get Your Gun movie showcase, which featured the best and the worst of Hollywood’s World War II propaganda films, and I loved every one of them. I identified wholeheartedly with every hero, and felt the righteousness of perpetuating the worst violence upon the evil other, the Japanese or the Germans. That was the deep lesson that I learned. I never asked why, or if this was the right thing to do, or if there might be a different way. A man toughs it out and prevails over his enemies — kill or be killed. Even if he was killed, it was righteous if it was a fighting death that enabled his buddies to prevail.

A year after graduating from high school I joined the Marine Corps Reserve. I say that seeking the opportunity to kill another man was an avocation because I never did it on a full-time basis. There were other things I wanted to accomplish, among them getting a college education. Nonetheless, I made a significant commitment to the pursuit of a killing. Marine Corps boot camp is the great foundry of manhood, where they go one up on turning boys into men — they turn men into Marines, the manliest of men, the best perpetuators of violence.

It was in boot camp that rays of reality started to shine on the patent lies and fantasies that I had consumed as a boy on those late Saturday nights. Little things that should be obvious, but aren’t when they’re wrapped in glory and righteousness. I remember a live fire demonstration of the Claymore mine, an “anti-personnel” mine about the size of a book, and that features hundreds of pellets the size of 00 buckshot embedded in C4, a plastic explosive. When one was detonated, I thought, “It would be horrible to be on the receiving end of that.” And there was a “Jody,” a call and response sort of song led by the drill instructor to keep cadence while marching, that had the lines:

Momma, Momma can’t you see
what the Marine Corps’ done to me?
Put a rifle in my hand.
Taught me how to kill a man.

Kill a man? Wait a minute, I signed up to kill Japs, Nazis, commies, gooks, Saddam, or the Ayatollah, not kill a man. It started to dawn on me what this business was really about. It sobered me. But rather than make any moral judgement about what I was learning in boot camp, I simply eliminated the moral question. I was learning to do a job. I was giving myself over to be an implement of the state, to the people of the United States of America, to do a difficult job, and as a matter of pride I was going to be the best that I could be at that job. It removed any pretense of morality from what I was doing. How I was going to be used in this job became a matter of faith — I didn’t question where or who I might fight, but I would do my duty and do the worst violence to whomever I was set upon.

That I came to the above conclusion is kind of scary. It is frightening to think that I could have been in a boot camp of the Waffen SS in 1940, and could have come to the same conclusion, with the most evil of consequences. But it could have happened. I am capable of evil.

If I, a typical human being, am capable of the worst evil, how can it be prevented? The first step is in recognizing the evil that exists in oneself. Personal evil is probably the one thing that everyone can do something about. The trick is recognizing it. It’s a good bet that anything that has taints of violence is evil. War, for example. If you believe in a good war, evil lurks nearby. Or how about, “All casual drug users should be taken out and shot,” or “Some women want to be raped,” or “Taggers should be caned,” or “If a fag touches me, I’ll beat the shit out him,” or “Reasonable force”?

Examine your own beliefs and attitudes, and then read the words that appear on the cover of this magazine. There may not be much you can do to stop the war in Bosnia, or gang violence in the street, but you can do something about your own violent tendencies. And you’ve got them if you’re an American.

Stop the violence, increase the peace, brothers and sisters.

###

The following quotation appeared on the cover of NoHo Magazine:

War, with all its glorification of brute force, is essentially a degrading thing. It demoralizes those who are trained for it. It brutalizes men of naturally gentle character. It outrages every beautiful canon of morality. Its path of glory is fouled with the passions of lust, and red with the blood of murder. This is not the pathway to our goal. The grandest aid to development of strong, pure, beautiful character, which is our aim, is the endurance of suffering. Self restraint, unselfishness, patience, gentleness, these are the flowers which spring beneath the feet of those who accept but refuse to impose suffering.

— Gandhi

It looks like a big, salmon monolith. It’s got a huge, gilded, hood-ornament-of-a fountain surrounded by life-size statues from television’s Golden Age. Aside from a few paparazzi-filled affairs, the place seems pretty lifeless, an image not helped by some empty storefront windows. What goes on at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, anyway? Is its sole purpose to simply dole out dubious awards to itself once a year?

What follows is a small glimpse into a few intriguing areas of that enigmatic structure. But first let me qualify myself. I’m currently a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (A.T.A.S.) who also happens to be a skeptic. I joined simply because I qualified (thanks to three television credits and three member sponsors). I also wanted to see movies in a really cool theatre close to my house, where I knew the audiences would be somewhat controlled. But I am leery of any organization with enough money to erect an icon of “Lucy” sitting giddily in its front yard.

After a few months of screenings, I started to investigate what other niceties the place had to offer. First, I discovered the Academy was one of the only organizations of its kind to offer highly professional workshops to its members (and not in some guy’s living room, either). The directors’ group, for instance, meets at the Burbank Studio Ranch. I joined the writers’ group, where I eventually pumped out a feature and a few sit-com samples in a very nurturing environment.

After a while, I started getting fliers in the mail for free lectures and one-day seminars. This year, A.T.A.S. made the headlines by hosting the “Superhighway Summit,” a symposium on the future of telecommunications that featured such movers and shakers as Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, plus a key-note address by Vice-President Al Gore.

Then one day I was asked to vote on some student videos for the annual College Student Awards. The committee I hooked up with spent one afternoon viewing documentaries from around the country from little, unheard-of colleges in the Midwest to more famous establishments like U.S.C. and N.Y.U.

The woman in charge, Price Hicks, was dead serious about picking only the best, and the rules were so rigid that many potential winners were quickly disqualified. As the day progressed, I found out that Hicks serves as director of the Educational Programs and Services Department —- a branch of the Academy dedicated to doing something for the greater good of education.

“We tend to focus on three main areas,” Hicks told me. “The college awards, faculty seminars, and the student internship program.”

Faculty seminars require Hicks to travel across the United States to about ten campuses a year, discussing with teachers the ever-changing rules of Hollywood. This enables them to pass on the most current and useful industry information to their pupils.

The Academy’s student internship program has been selected as one of the top ten internship programs in the United States by the 1995 edition of The Princeton Review. Ms. Hicks, who has headed the program for the past ten years, offered a quick back-ground sketch.

“This is the 27th year of the Academy’s internship program, which began as a modest local program and was conducted for six weeks in the summer without a stipend,” she said. “Academy members serve as judges, sifting through endless pages of application materials to select the finalists. I’m always amazed at the care, the concern, and meticulous attention the judges bring to the process.”

This year the judges looked at 654 entries from 223 schools and 41 states. From these, 167 judges helped to select 28 students to serve 24 areas of the television industry (from writing to editing, animation to music). And the Academy pays each winner a $1,600 stipend and a $300 travel allowance if they live outside of Los Angeles. The students are required to sign a contract and promise to work a full, 40-hour week during the internship period.

Hicks is quick to point out that the program has undergone a lot of changes over the years, in order to improve its effectiveness. John Nachreiner, the first intern to sit on the Academy’s Board of Governors, came through the apprenticeship in its early stages.

“In 1972, you only got to watch what was going on. And I didn’t get paid. There were problems with the Union, in my case, and I couldn’t join. But they seem to have overcome some of those hurdles.”

Muriel, one of the Educational Program Service administrators, states that many of the successful interns come from unlikely training grounds, such as Missouri, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

“People have erroneous ideas that everyone in television comes from U.S.C., N.Y.U., or U.C.L.A.,” she says. “It’s not true.”

In July, I attended a gala reception at the Fox Television Studios to honor this year’s winners in the internship program. Many of the hosts (from such series as Picket Fences and Mad About You) had nothing but genuine praise for their interns. Past winners were also in attendance, and when they started to rattle off their accomplishments, I was stunned. A number of these former apprentices have gone on to write, direct, and produce television shows and films in a relatively short period of time. A short list includes Martin Bruestle, co-producer of Northern Exposure, Toni Perling, story editor for Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman, and Brannon Braga, who started in the offices of Star Trek: the Next Generation. He subsequently wrote several Trek episodes and recently finished penning the next Star Trek motion picture.

Rick Ouellete is one of several interns who have decided to return the favor and become sponsors themselves. As Senior Producer of on-air promotions at NBC, he knows how tough it is to get that foot in the door and how the Academy’s program can be enormously helpful.

“To get a job today, it’s almost a prerequisite to have some sort of real-world experience, and the only way to get it is to have an internship,” he says. “In other parts of the country, there’s an aura around Los Angeles. And when you come here, and finally punch through that and are inside and a real participant in everything that’s going on, it’s a pretty amazing experience.”

Indeed.

By Jim Berg

A young mother struggles to board a bus, carrying a small child and a bag of groceries. She has to put down the child and the groceries to reach into her pocket for her bus pass, then find a seat on the crowded bus. A young man stands and offers his seat near the front of the bus, for which she is grateful. After finally getting seated with child and groceries, she notices that the elderly gentleman who boarded the bus after her is twenty-five cents short of the required fare. She quickly reaches into her bag and produces a quarter, which she offers to the old man. Even though he speaks little English, his gratitude transcends language, and the bus driver is relieved of the conflict between sympathy and fare policy.

Meanwhile, in another part of town, an old man is pistol-whipped, clutching the steering wheel of his Lexus, which his tormentor is trying to take away from him. The thief is yelling profanities and threatening to kill the man if he doesn’t let go of the steering wheel. Finally, the thief makes good on his threat and shoots the old man in the head. He does so more out of rage and frustration than of a desire to take the car, because after a moment of realization, he runs away instead of pulling the body from the car and driving off. The first police officer on the scene thinks it was rather stupid of the thief to go so far as to commit murder, then not take the car. It’s not unusual to attribute poor decisions made in the panic-driven moments of committing a crime to stupidity on the part of the criminal.

One of these little scenarios is going to make the five o’clock news, where it will become symbolic of a time. It will be the lead story to define another day in the city and shape many people’s perceptions of the city in which they live. Both scenarios involve the interaction of human beings, doing very human things. Doing things that humans have always done. Yet one will be assigned much greater significance. The talking head — the news anchor — will put on the somber face and shake his head at the senselessness of the crime, and we, the viewer, encouraged by “get tough” politicians, will be expected to feel outrage akin to the hysteria of the victim’s immediate family.

No, thank you. Certainly, sympathy and comfort goes out to those who have been hurt by the actions of others, but the powerful emotions of victimization should not define the world in which we live. The appropriate response to crime is sympathy to the victims, but a sober, thoughtful response to the issue of crime in general. Justice has become a pseudonym for revenge, and, as a people, we should be above this bloodthirsty desire. This is something that almost all of the great moral traditions teach. When wronged, the higher response is one of forgiveness.

The fact is that most people stand a slim chance of being seriously hurt by crime, and it is on this fact that we should base our behavior and world view. There are some very basic things that can be done to drastically reduce the chance of being the victim of a crime. Don’t do drugs or alcohol, avoid abusive relationships, be aware and alert, especially after dark, don’t flaunt wealth, and treat everybody with respect.

One’s sense of security is largely defined by the media one consumes. Be selective. There are a plethora of choices, and more on the way. Choose to consume media that is empowering; media that reveals solutions; media that respects its audience. Reject media that is demeaning; that makes you feel powerless; that is disrespectful. But reject it in an affirmative way, by choosing an alternative or creating an alternative. Censorship or family values fascism is not the answer. We all have the ultimate power to turn off the media and children should be taught how and when to turn it off. By choosing wisely, we will influence the quality of the choices that are available. That’s the beauty of the system we have created.

It is beyond my comprehension how anyone could ascribe racial overtones to such a positive community effort. Where did her twisted assessment “White folks fear fest” come from? How damaging, and how untrue.

Granted, people in our community do live with fear. However, it is not racial fear. Look around you in the NoHo district and the rest of the Valley. You see buildings crumbled by the January earthquake; you see businesses closed down because of economic adversity. People are afraid to go out at night because they fear for their safety. There is a pervasive sense of vulnerability.

Criminals and victims come in all colors; earthquakes affect all of us. Our “safety fair” was a small but heartfelt and constructive effort to help the community. Our only goal was to help people protect themselves and their families.

If you did not appreciate what we were doing, why not refuse to publish anything at all? That would have been a far better reflection of your editorial honesty than disseminating such a spurious statement.

Ilene Atkins Studio City Residents Association and LAPD Neighborhood Watch

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I am responding to your request that readers comment to your reviews. Since my production was one of your subjects, I am more than happy to do so.

What strikes me first in your review of Across From Cindy’s Corner (May, 1994) are the inaccuracies and the omissions. It’s inaccurate to say, “The fifties tunes ‘Golly Gee’ and ‘Red Button Blues). barely giveus a hint of the fourchord playfulness that made the music of that era famous.’ “Golly Gee” is a legitimate fifties hit. It was my hit, and “Red Bottom Blues” is not intended to be “a fifties song.” It’s a blues song about child abuse. Your reviewer, Daniel Holmes, couldn’t get past the costumes in his immature and unconscionably shallow critique of not only these numbers, but of the show as a whole.

Across From Cindy’s Corner is far more than a “glorification” of my life. It’s about “every man” and “every woman.” When I sing the finale, “Live Your Dream,” I’m singing not only for myself, but for all of us.

The extremely odd omission of my years as a Broadway performer, and my being discovered by Richard Rodgers, can only be deemed a convenient lapse on your part to justify this nasty and suspiciously personal review. Just for the record, I’ve had a lifetime of operatic training, as well as a pop recording career with such labels as Warner Brothers and Columbia. When I “chew a lyric” or “growl a phrase,” it’s by choice.

As I write this, we’re going into our eighteenth week of sold-out houses with many audience members returning again and again with friends and family. We hear each week that audience members of every age have been profoundly and positively affected. Mr. Holmes seems to suggest that with the price of admission, the ticket is stamped “fool.” In a community that in its highest sense hopes to support and nurture one another, Mr. Holmes and yourself might re-evaluate the idea that audiences (the general public) are just plain morons being ushered into my theatre the way P.T. Barnum “made huge profits selling tickets to view a rare bufthlo migration in New Jersey.” Thank you for the thought, though. If I am that powerful, I better give myself a raise!

After over twenty-five years as a performer, I’m used to reviews with a spectrum of opinions. As a producer, director, and composer of several plays, including Pepper Street, which ran for five years here in L.A. and was optioned for Broadway (another of Mr. Holmes’ convenient omissions), I’m used to raves as well as pans. What I’m not used to is the immature and mean spirited nature of a paper that professes non-violence and peace, yet radiates viciousness and harmful intent that attempts to be cutting edge, and is just cutting.

Gene Bua Acting For Life

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Not only can we dish it out, but we can take it. Send your letters to Letters, NoHo Magazine, 11204 HustonStreet, NoHo, CA 91601. Letters may be edited. For better or worse, we value your opinion.

Lonny Chapman (front, center) and Janet Wood (to his left) with Reaching Up cast

By Jeff Nelson

The Group Repertory Theatre is currently engaged in its twentieth year of operation, which makes it one of the oldest and most successful theatres in the Valley. I dropped in recently to ask Lonny Chapman, the Artistic Director, and Janet Wood, a founding member, about their theatre and the developing scene in the NoHo Arts District. We met in the lobby of the theatre on a weekday morning, when the building was deserted except for a few volunteers who were working on the latest publicity mailing.

So tell me about the Group Repertory Theatre. Tell me about your twentieth anniversary.

Janet Wood – Well, right now we’re doing a musical called Reaching Up. It used to be called Role Play, and it was originated here in 1989 by Doug Haverty and Adryan Russ and was very successful. From here it went to the Call Theater, then to New York off-off-Broadwav. It was very successful there. Then it went off-Broadway, and the New York Times gave it such a great review that instead of running six weeks it ran six months. Since we’ve been in existence for twenty years, we wanted to do something special, so we decided to do Reaching Up as our twentieth-year musical.

Lonny Chapman: This theatre opened for productions in 1973. We were in a small theater on Van Ness Blvd., [in Holly-wood] a tiny little theatre with 35 seats. There were about 13 or 14 actors. I went over there to watch them doing scenes, and they wanted to get a theatre started.

JW: We were a theatre in search of an artistic director, and Lonny was an artistic director in search of a theatre.

LC: So I came in and saw the work, and I said I would only be involved in it if they went into productions. I wasn’t interested in doing classes or scenework or that kind of thing. So it began with our first production.

JW: That was Round Dance and that was a huge hit.

LC: Yes, it was.

JW: So huge that it forced us to get into a bigger theatre the next year because so many people wanted to join.

LC: So we moved over to Magnolia, where the senior citizen’s complex is now, on the corner. That was 1975 when we moved over there, and it was 1983 when we moved here.

Do you have a theme that links your work? Is there a style you’re bringing to the theatre you do here?

LC: Well, the theme, if you want to call it a theme, can be summed up in one word: “eclectic.” If you’ll notice, there’s a listing on the wall, here, of the shows that we’ve done, and you’ll see by looking at that that this theatre is not stuck in one kind of thing, whether it be new plays, classical plays, or whatever. We’ve done serious plays, comedy, even Shakespeare a couple of times, now.

How do you perceive what’s going on in theatre in the Valley? The Los Angeles Times recently suggested that it’s the next Big Thing for theatre in Los Angeles.

JW: Absolutely. That’s what’s happening since this whole Valley Theatre League and NoHo Arts District started. It suddenly became obvious that there was tremendous theatre in the Valley, and nobody knew about it. Then, when people realized what was going on here, we all got together via the Valley Theatre League and, you know, that whole “NoHo” thought. The idea was to join together to support one another instead of being in competition. If someone needed something from one theatre, give it to another. There was a whole support group. All of a sudden — you know what it started to feel like to me? It started to feel like Greenwich Village in New York, where it’s a community. It’s a community for artists, and I think the more we put that out there, the more fun it is to be here, and there’s an excitement. I do believe that this whole area is becoming a new center for the arts. This is it. This is where it’s all starting to happen.

LC: I’ve always felt that the more theatres you have, the better. I think it’s good for all of the theatres. It’s like 45th street in New York. There’s nine theatres, and everybody wants to open their play where there’s nine theatres, as opposed to where there’s only one on a block. It’s just that psychology of, “This is the place to go.”

What’s entertaining to you? What make a play good?

JW: For me, it’s when I’m really touched in some way. Even in a comedy or musical when I’m enthralled and I’m happy and I feel great when it affects me in some way. I think that what art is about, many times, is that it touches some part of us that makes our “aliveness” come to the surface.

Are critics useful?

JW: I think a good critic is one who describes the play, what it’s about, describes how he thinks the work is, and whether or not it worked for him. You know, if he doesn’t like the play, if it’s not his thing, or if he doesn’t think it’s well written, that’s fine, to give all those opinions, but he should describe the play.

What are your actors like and where do they come from? Are they coming out of schools? Are they coming in off the street?

LC: We have two groups of actors: young people who have no professional experience, who come here to work with us and who have to have a responsibility of doing certain technical junk, like running sound, lights, stage managing, props, house managing, etc. They can then get involved here — read for shows. That’s one group. Then, the other people all have to be professionals to join this theater. We didn’t audition people for a long time; for years we just interviewed them. We got some prettv good people, without auditioning them. But lately, for the last couple of years, we’ve been audtioning them.

How do you decide on a play? How do you decide on your season?

LC: I do most of the choosing. I wouldn’t be involved in a company where you had a committee of actors or something to pick the play. I wouldn’t be a part of it. But I believe in getting feedback from people in the company. Many times a play has been suggested to me and we’ve ended up doing it.

What is it in a play that makes you say, “Yes, that’s the play I want to do this year”?

LC: First of all, we have to deal with the company when picking the plays. We try not to, these days, pick a play with a tremendously huge cast. If you get 25-30 people, you have problems with it. It might be a great play, but you have problems with it.

You have logistic problems.

LC: Yes, and cost problems, too. Plus, if it’s too technically difficult for us, we won’t choose it, because we find we run into a lot of problems if we have too much of a technical play that requires a lot of sets.

How much do you worry about what yourt audience will think?

LC: Well, we don’t have that big of a subscription list. We had a year when we were dark getting this place ready, and we lost most of them, the subscription we had, so we don’t have to worry so much about them. Personally, I would like to get younger audiences in here, and I think that might impact the plays that we do.

I’m under the impression that the plays you do here are focused on being “entertaining,” as opposed to, say, being “political,” or “avant garde.” This theater doesn’t seem to be a political theatre.

LC: It’s not a political theatre.

Is my impression a wrong impression?

LC: Well, it’s wrong in one sense because we’ve done a lot of serious plays. We do some plays that have political themes in them, like All the King’s Men. But I’m not a political person, in that sense.

You don’t hate an agenda. You’re not put-ting out a “message.”

LC: I like political theatre, but what we have done here is some of the great authors, both European and American, from Saroyan, to Strindberg, to Chekhov, to Betrolt Brecht, to George Bernard Shaw, Anderson, Eugene O’Neill, Noel Coward — so we’ve done all the great playwrights. That’s important to us. I think it’s important to any theatre.

It seems that developing playwrights is one of the most important things a theatre can do. Would you agree?

JW: I think it’s one of the most important things, because getting material for every theatre, it’s really difficult. And when you have a group of people sitting around every weekend (as we do here, with our Playwright’s Unit), and saying why this works and why it doesn’t, and helping and supporting each other, I think you really get to see what does work, you know? So what you have, hopefully, is a little stockpile of developing plays, some of which will be fabulous, some of which, won’t (laughs).

LC: We’ve done about a hundred and twelve plays, in twenty years, and I would say 47 of them were new plays.

JW: This theatre takes a lot of chances. Where other theatres may go for more safety — they know the play is going to be a hit, or it’s an established play — this theatre will take more chances. And the more chances we take, the more there’s a possibility that it’s not going to work. But, then, you get the great ones, too.

LC: We’ve had many productions that were really top-flight, from In the Boom Boom Room, to Company, to Chicago, to the King’s Men, and there’s probably a couple of others I’m not thinking of, that really were quite stunning productions.

What makes a production “stunning?”

LC: All the ingredients come together. Of course you’ve got to have a play. If the play isn’t there you’re not going to have it, no matter how stunning the production is. If it’s a poor play, then you’ll have a problem. But if the play is good, then it can be a stunning production.

JW: And the magic fairy comes and sprinkles her fairy dust on it (laughs).

It was sincere
There was little remorse
Just big remorse
Cumulative payments
the rage was so common that when anything
went calmly I was totally elated. As though I better live
this joy fully before it dissipates again
this card house was full of kingdoms
Jokers, hearts
royalty crowned me and said “girl, so much self-pity
do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight”
Wasn’t that K.C. and the Darkness Band — get real!
I looked at suicide hotlines like cooks look at recipes
Knowingly but slightly skeptical
I tried to go to carnivals
but the air was too bitter with broken laughter
I thought I needed a 24 hour hospital
but I needed an almost 24 hour coffeehouse

When words curled around my mind and said
please take us in, love us, name our language
it gave me a responsibility equal to motherhood
Stronger than citizenship
higher than helium even dreams about
When I want to throw a piano at your song and dance
dance and song cynical prison for pleasure
I instead pick up a pencil.

When I want to fall on my knees in front of you
and say no, I’m not intending on giving you head
I was thinking more along the line of fairy tales
how ’bout happily ever after. Or something slightly more permanent but having sympathy for your bare feet and bifocals
I didn’t want to see you get all out of breath
running away from my sensible soul and wild throat

So I wrote a thang
I wanted to tell everybody watch out women he just
wants your flesh
You could be in my shoes years later
trying to do cartwheels in quicksand
but some just want his flesh too
So I brought a notebook with me to the river in my mind
and dipped my eyes in deep
there was always now a healthy way to vent rage
It made me sick
I couldn’t justify throwing things.
I memorized the names of folk singers
past, present, and get this — future
I couldn’t scream — as the walls banged my head
Some of the polite walls parted and became doors

I forgot where the suicide hot line numbers were.
I stayed up all hours talking about living
The word said
Mama we feel pretty safe you’ll always shelter us
no abandoning us
we don’t have any connections with rent control
we love you for honoring us
And every day was Mother’s Day
and being word ma made me even more appreciative of my mom
So when I occasionally threw my past at her and she ducked
I forgave her
I felt remorse
for all of us
the words that were in me for so many years
waiting to hatch — waiting for me to say
I was ready to rise above myself and
become more myself
levitating to a different magician
And realizing the people who are ashamed of me, my quirks
are not growing
they are wilting
And I stand ready with water
The ritual is ancient
wallflower becomes sunflower becomes poet
this stuff is ordinary and extraordinary
becomes painter
or incense stick maker
or archivist
or card house interior decorator
Sometimes I want to get so close to you and
remember all I ever forgave and scream in your ear
but I realize
a poem is the scream that lasts
but just to make sure I get through, if in your dreams
you hear a hissing sound
it’s just your conscience or me.
Or just history breathing

Copyright 1992 Ellyn Maybe

Ellyn Maybe — Photo by Cindy Beal

By Teresa Willis

Ellyn Maybe is a poet’s poet. The mention of her name among those familiar with her work often prompts a wordless response comprised of a drop-jawed expression of awe and wonder. But she also has an appeal that reaches those not impressed with poetry and poets. “I don’t like poetry but I like your work,” is a comment she hears frequently.

She is everywhere. From Laguna, to Santa Barbara, to Echo Park, to Venice, to, yes, even NoHo — wherever there is a poetry event or other eclectic art happening, it is not surprising to see her show up in the audience or as a performer. A recurring guest on KPFK’s Wee Hours, she has also been featured on KCRW’s Man in the Moon and Poetry Connection (also on KPFK). The latter is a long-running show that has featured many poetry personalities of local and global fame, but the show with Ellyn Maybe elicited the most response in the history of the program.

The January 17 earthquake shook her and her mother out of their Chatsworth home — their building was condemned — prompting a string of “Ellyn Maybe benefits” in the artistic community. Area poet Kiva J. Catalina hosted the Scary Talent Show at the Iguana Cafe in North Hollywood on February 5th, in which Ellyn appeared. Kiva and the other performers spontaneously opted to donate the proceeds of the event to Ellyn. In a more formal effort, poet/musician Matthew Niblock organized a roster of the community’s finest musicians and poets for a benefit in late February at the Iguana. The room was packed, and the show was phenomenal. Finally, on March 27, Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet Laurel Ann Bogen read from her upcoming book, The Last Girl in the Land of Butterflies at Beyond Baroque Bookstore in Venice. Proceeds were donated to Ellyn Maybe.

“It’s unbelievable,” says Maybe, of the overwhelming support she has received. “I guess there’s a real love. Its probably a mixture of [love] as a person, but also as an artist — which is nice, that I have friends both ways.”

I would fall into the second distinction — one of Ellyn’s “as an artist” friends. I first saw her perform at an open poetry reading in 1991. It was probably the first poetry reading I had attended in my adult life. The performers were what I have come to recognize as your basic blend of L.A. poets from the dull didactics to the perverse pontificates. Then it was Ellyn’s turn. She defied all my jaded categorizations. A frizzy-headed, high-voiced, hippie woman who seemed at once flustered and thrilled to be on stage — she seemed harmless enough at the time. Then she began to read. I didn’t know what had hit me. I’m only just now beginning to figure it out. But she still defies categorization, jaded or otherwise.

She christened herself Ellyn Maybe circa 1988. The name evolved from her hesitancy to read her work at open readings. “I’d put ‘Ellyn’ and then I’d put in parentheses ‘(maybe I’ll read)’. Like if I wanna run out, or freak out ’cause I was so new to it and everything, that’d be OK. So at a reading it just kind of ‘Ellyn maybe I’ll read? Ellyn Maybe?’ It just kind of ‘yes!’ It was an organic thing. It’s funny how things do their strange dance, the serendipity of things.”

In the poetry community, there is, thankfully, an abundance of criticism. However, Ellyn Maybe’s work is rarely questioned. She seems exempt from the scathing commentary whispered in the back of coffeehouses during readings. She has a rare humility concerning her work. It is as though an Ellyn Maybe poem wasn’t written, it simply… happened — like some undefined force of nature. “Well, I know I’m not a craftsman, because the poem comes. There’s not really a revision period,” says Maybe, “something will spark a poem, it gels, then it comes out when it’s ready. I don’t think it was ‘Oh, I gotta think of an image!’ No, I can’t do that. It comes because it’s not pushed, probably. It’s like, magical… a whole other language. By trusting, waiting for that language to knock, and it does, then it’s ready. But I don t know if someone could, like, bang on the door. It comes to you, but it comes ’cause you’re open to it. Like, yeah, somebody’s home. A lot of people get distracted and they’re missing the language. They’re numbing themselves in some way and it just can’t get through. ‘Cause it’s intense. It’s intense to have stuff come and not nod out. ‘Cause you face things that way. You deal in reality Surreality.

Ellyn was born in Wisconsin, but moved to L.A. with her family in 1980. At 20 years old, she felt compelled to move to New York City, where she was an apprentice at the Village Voice and the Actor’s Studio. For the first time, she had extended contact and encouragement from other artists. “It’s lonely when you haven’t met your kindred spirits yet. You’re how you are, but it’s not the complete thing. You’re just kind of flailing around, you’re just like, ‘Well, where are they?’ Like waiting for Godot or something. [But] there were people saying, ‘You should write. I think you’d be good.’ I just didn’t have any confidence, ’cause when I was little I wrote. Then as I got older, there was a long time of being unconventional and being mistreated for it, just took away any sense of self-esteem and confidence. So I started to write there, and the people I showed the stuff to were like, ‘Wow.'”

Being “unconventional” is a tough job, but Ellyn handles it beautifully. “I deal with a lot of people’s expectations and I just shatter them. If you’re different, if you stand out, it really hurts, ’cause I’m real sensitive. So you write. You use it in such a way that’s good. Like a tin can line that goes through all the people that go through stuff and it’s just a thing that is, or there’s just so many ways it could destroy you. If you don’t honor yourself enough to take a good route, you could go nuts. A lot of people think I’m on drugs because I’m very weird, but I never have smoked or drank or anything. It all goes into the work. I just never was around drugs. I was already seeing the kind of things people wanna use drugs to see. People tell me I have a naturally stoned sensibility, which I’m happy about. I think that’s really cool.”

Ellyn is also an archivist. She is usually seen with a small recorder by her side at performances by her favorite artists. “It feels like I’m taking something that ought to be done and just doing it. It’s really a passionate thing. There could be a time way down the road when you might want to know what was going on back there. In many cases, that is the thing that lasts — what artists say, more than was in, say, the equivalent of a newspaper of a certain time. They’re going to look at Van Gogh’s painting, they’re goin’ to listen to a poem, maybe by Ginsberg or something. We have to somehow honor our stuff. To feel it’s worth. To preserve it.” One would assume she’d run into resistance from musicians, especially, because of the bootleg factor. But Ellyn and her tape recorder are usually welcome. “Nobody gets copies of stuff because I’m afraid some people have in mind archiving in an exploitative manner. I’m real protective. I’m really staunch on artists’ rights. A lot of people are so into a certain fame thing that they’ll do anything, regardless of, in the long term, if it’s good the the work. [I] just have to honor the work. The work honors me.”

Ellyn was chosen to represent Los Angeles in the MTV Free Your Mind Spoken Word Competition. She opened for the tour’s Los Angeles show at the Troubador on March 1 “My stuff really says how I feel. It’s so accurate. But during the earthquake, there was a big chance that we might not get an evacuation and I didn’t have copies of my stuff. I was saying that I’d rather my poetry live than me. It’s larger than me. I learn from it myself. Since it comes in such a magical way, I have a good time just looking at it sometimes. It’s truly a gift to even be open to wanting to sit down and look at life that way. It’s just being willing to have your eyes open. There’s this poem I have, called, ‘Artists are only people who keep their eyes open with toothpicks: a Marlon Brando love poem’ ’cause I think that’s what he did during the making of Apocalypse Now. You have to, at least, for me, I have to… see. There’s so many ways to distract yourself that it’s really miraculous that there are people who are willing to see. It’s a wonderful thing because that’s what makes the world magic.”

Ellyn Maybe will be reading at the Iguana Cafe in North Hollywood on April 15. The event will include an open reading, so she encourages any poets out there to show up and participate. She also encourages any written comments to her work. You can write to her at P.O. Box 1793, Venice, CA 90294-1793.

She has a tape of her poetry on sale called A day in the life of a working poor xylophone maker. She has two books of poetry available, entitled, The Cowardice of Amnesia and Mantra’s Best Friend/Man’s Best Friend. All are available by contacting Ellyn Maybe at the address above.

Yowzah — photo by Cindy Beal

By Jim Berg

A half hour before show time, Yowzah is nervously staring off into middle space, running through a mental checklist, twice. He turns to me and smiles, “It’s always like this before a show. I gotta make sure everything is right.”

Yowzah is an outside promoter for the Blue Saloon, a North Hollywood neighborhood watering hole that normally caters to the Hollywood working class people with job titles like Grip or Boom Operator — the techies who do the real work in the Industry. Before Yowzah arrives at the Blue Saloon, the music coming over the juke box is usually something like Rush, or Bad Company, or Led Zeppelin, or Jimi Hendrix. After Yowzah arrives, the music coming over the juke box is Pearl Jam, or Nirvana, or Smashing Pumpkins, or Velvet Underground.

Every Saturday night, the Blue Saloon becomes Club Dump — Yowzah’s showcase of local alternative rock talent. By dimming some lights, changing the bulbs in others, and moving a pool table, this neighborhood bar is transformed into a rock and roll night club. But the transition isn’t complete until the audience arrives. As the first band for the evening is setting up, a metamorphosis occurs in the Blue Saloon as ball caps and T-shirts are replaced by body art and leather. There are long-haired men and bald-headed women — all tattooed and pierced. These are the aficionados of the alternative scene, and they come to hear bands like Mother Tongue, Spindle, Wax, and Snare.

Club Dump started at the Central in Hollywood. Yowzah was working there, hosting a regular show, when he decided to start his own club. His primary ambition is as a musician, heading Methadone Cocktail, and promoting his own club helps further his musical career. After the Central was bought by Johnny Depp and turned into the Viper Room, Yowzah had disagreements with the new management and decided to leave. A resident of North Hollywood, Yowzah wanted to find a local venue for the club. After meeting Blue, owner of the Blue Saloon, Yowzah found him not only agreeable to bringing the club to the Saloon, but also agreeable to work with. Club Dump came to the Blue Saloon in July of 1993.

With the growing success and popularity of Club Dump on Saturday night, the club is being expanded to Thursday night, and with the improved sound equipment, the Blue Saloon is becoming a noteworthy venue for new local alternative rock. More and more, the myth that the Valley is not a worthwhile place to go for live music, either as a band or as a fan, is being put to the lie. As Yowzah puts it, “You can come here, park for free, pay a third less for drinks, hang out with people just as pierced and tattooed as anyplace in Hollywood and have a really good time with really cool people, without the posing and attitude.”

I always thought it would have been really cool to have seen the Beatles during their Hamburg days, when they were defining and shaping their music in the grueling club scene, playing for little or no money, but crafting the music that would overwhelm a generation. The fact is, if your idea of being on the cutting edge of innovative rock and roll is listening to KROQ, you’re closer to the scabbard than the blade. To be one of the few to participate in music innovation and experimentation, the clubs are the place to be, otherwise join the millions of followers who are exposed to new music when it finally gets to the radio.

By Jeff Nelson

Knockin’ ‘Em Dead, a musical version of the life of gangster Al Capon, is the latest in a string of mediocre productions to come from the American Renegade Theatre. Director David Cox and his partners in crime have gone in way over their heads this time, however, and produced something truly awful. If the American Renegade is trying to establish itself as the worst theatre in the NoHo Arts District, this show will most certainly help them secure that reputation. Discriminating theatregoers vill stay as far away from this disaster as possible.

The failure of Knockin’ ‘Em Dead is particularly disappointing considering the position the American Renegade wishes to occupy in the Arts District. David Cox is often cited as the “visionary” of North Hollywood, and it is true that many positive developments in the area are a result of his hard work and dedication to the Arts District idea. However, Mr. Cox must realize that in order for there to be an “Arts District,” one of the necessary components is art. The audiences in this district have high standards for what they see and demand more, much more, than this show delivers. Mr. Cox’s failure is that he does not exact from his company the level of excellence that the NoHo audience desires.

The main problem with Knockin’ ‘Em Dead is its abominable script, written, along with the music and lyrics, by Mike Reynolds. Completely lacking in conflict, character development, or credible situations, it consists mainly of a rapid-fire series of sketches that catalogue the main events of Al Capone’s life in chronological order, like a timeline in an encyclopedia. Often these expository scenes are less than a minute long, or performed off-stage, or in blackout, leaving one to wonder why they were even included in the first place. And never once does Reynolds ask the serious questions about the meaning of Capone’s life, or what the canonization of such a ruthless killer in the iconography of the American mind says about those who venerate him. In fact, Knockin “Em Dead treats Capone as a kind of misunderstood and lovable cartoon figure from the past —- a character that should not be taken any more seriously than the Charleston, flagpole sitters, or bathtub gin. For all that, this trivialization of Capone’s life, and Reynolds reluctance (or inability) to explore honestly the contradictions and complexities of his subject, actuallv have the odd and unintended effect of exposing the lie of Capone’s status as anti-hero. Even through a dense haze of treacly nostalgia and cloying sentimentality, Capone emerges as a reprehensible figure —– a self-centered killer and no Disney-esque production number or dimly lit dream ballet can cover the ugly nakedness of this fact. In fact, one leaves Knockin’ Em Dead asking why anyone would even want to try.

As for the acting, singing, and dancing in the show, well, let’s just say that the cast is large. But even that characteristic is a liability when the entire company crowds together on a set that barely leaves room to raise an eyebrow, much less dance. As Al Capone, Josh Cruze gamely hacks his way through this mess, but he is hopelessly lost, and ends up in much the same place as he began. Cheryl Cameron, as Capone’s bland and long-suffering wife Mae, is bland and long-suffering. The various gangsters, molls, flower sellers, FBI men, detectives, reporters, and prison officials that populate this production are treated as little more than scenery, mannequins who stare into space or gesticulate silently among themselves until they are required to actually do something, like sing, dance, or deliver lines like, “Hey, everybody! Did You hear that Al’s coming back to town?” About the only bright spot in this sea of mediocrity was Shandi Sinnamon as Ann Torio, who manages to sparkle, even when singing such numbers as “Best and Dearest of Husbands,” a pre-feminist anthem, or the utterly forgettable (I know this because I’ve already forgotten it) “Knockin’ ‘Em Dead.”

Which brings us to the music. According to the press release, “each significant event in the story is marked by a musical number exemplifying the time period. These numbers include a minuet, an operatic aria and a criminal trial performed in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan. As the plot progresses chronologically, the music tends more to the styles of later composers such as Jerome Kern and Duke Ellington, with a final nod to Rogers (sic) and Hammerstein in the epilogue.” The fact that the minuet, opera, and Gilbert and Sullivan do not exemplify the time period covered in this show reveal just how carelessly every aspect of this production has been treated. And nothing I heard approached the level of Kern, Ellington, or Rodgers and Hammerstein. In the end, one can only shake one’s head and wonder. Who saw merit’ in this monstrosity? Who picked this script? Who thought this was a good idea? Who?

By Teresa Willis

Though he and his wife, Gale Ford, are settled nicely in Venice, Matthew Niblock got his start at the Poets’ Circle at the Iguana Cafe in North Hollywood. Since popping in on a Sunday afternoon in 1991 with a few “clunky metaphors,” Niblock has grown to be one of the area’s most prominent and prolific artists. He is a veteran of the bands Larger Than Life and October, and a founding board member of the Dance of the Iguana Press. Copies of his independently produced spoken word/music cassette The House I Live In are almost sold out (though you can still find a couple at the Iguana).

At a recent reading, Niblock read with five or six other poets. At a certain point, they all spontaneously started doing their “Matthew Niblock” poems. And most of them had one (or more). What is it about this guy that inspires his peers to laud and imitate?

TW: You were a Christian singer as a child.

MN: Yeah. I come from a very fanatically religious background in my immediate family that was surrounded, in context, by my extended family. My large, extended, drug-addicted, insane, abusive family. Not religious. Then this little cell of us that was going to save the rest of them.

TW: So you were this walking dichotomy that exploded on yourself.

MN: I hope so. When I was twelve years old, I found, in a terribly cliched fashion, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. All pretty much on the same day. It took a couple of years of really intense struggle between the two for me to decide to go with sex, drugs, and rock and roll full time. Rather than Christianity.

TW: Do you consider the L.A. poetry scene relevant? Do you think people are going to talk about this later?

MN: Yes. There are poets who are working now who are relevant and who are important, but there’s not a great continuity of style, there’s not a movement happening, not a Beat thing happening here. Which as far as I’m concerned, is good. The Beat movement produced a couple of very interesting poets who will last and lots of people who tried their hardest to sound like Allen Ginsberg. I would rather be a part of a community of poets who are good at what they do than part of a community of poets who imitate each other. There’s an enormous diversity of work going on. And I’m not including Dr. Suess rhyming journal entries. I’m talking about people who are real poets.

TW: Define “real poet.”

MN: Poetry has rhythm and some sort of meter. Even if the meter is wild, it should have some music to it. Some beat. Otherwise, it’s prose that somebody just broke up into lines because they decided they’d call it poetry.

TW: When did you start writing?

MN: When I was in the fifth grade I wrote a story. The characters were all other members of my fifth grade class. I’m sure it was horrendously bad. But, I remember that I read it in front of the class. And because I had written this story, I had all these people do whatever I wanted them to do. It was a very God-like experience. I felt very powerful. That is probably when I began to write. I published my first poem in the spring, 1990, issue of The Moment, which is a terrific magazine that’s not around anymore. I wrote it at five o’clock in the morning at a Denny’s in about three minutes and never made any editorial changes to it. Then I didn’t publish anything else for quite a while.

TW: I seem to remember you telling a story that you went to someone’s house, sat in front of a word processor for three days, and when you came out, you had a “voice.” You were a writer.

MN: That’s true. That would’ve been probably the spring of 1989. I did. I sat at a word processor for, like, three straight days. Drank lots and lots of coffee… and I wrote a very long poem which was not very good. I doubt if I have a copy of it today. If I did, I would be too embarrassed to show anyone. It was very awkward. I discovered in the process an interesting trick that’s served me well in my writing. I believe that if you tell the absolute truth about a circumstance or a situation, even in the plainest possible language, sometimes the truth is so unusual and so frightening, people interpret what you’ve written as symbolism or metaphor. When it’s not. And that’s when you begin to be able to, rather than using metaphors in your poems, you begin to use metaphors outside the poetry. So the whole poem becomes a metaphor for something. So I did come out of that experience with a “voice,” because I wrote something very true and very raw. But it was “God when I was a Kid” that really kicked me off. It was published in the first issue of The Dance of the Iguana in November of ’91. That happened because I went to a poet’s circle with my bad clunky metaphors. And my bad clunky metaphors were comparatively fresh and original. I met a poet named Allen J. Freedman, who was a very fine writer. I started working with him, and very quickly I began to write well. In just a matter of a few weeks, I was asked to be on the editorial board of The Dance of the Iguana. That experience was useful because I saw hundreds of bad poems. And we had to pick the good ones. That introduced me feet first to the ‘scene” in Los Angeles.

TW: Larger Than Life broke up soon after that.

MN: I gave my first poetry reading at the Iguana and the place was packed. I was a guest in someone else’s show. Maybe the best reading I’ve ever done. It was phenomenal. Three days after that first reading my band broke up. It was either I was going to be a writer or I wasn’t going to be a writer. I wrote a lot of poetry in that period because I wasn’t writing lyrics and I had to write something or I’d just blow up. I started to publish a lot then.

TW: In your last show at the Iguana, you put a lot of different mediums together.

MN: Yes, I read, I sang, and I did spoken word with music. I’ve also done spoken word with video and spoken word with live, multi-media type stuff. I have an album, if you will. An independent audio cassette that was released in 1993 called The House I Live In that is spoken word and songs. My friend Cliff Ulrich is a guitar player and songwriter who had an old, piece-of-shit, falling apart 4-track from the dawn of time and he set it up in my living room. He just started working and people came by. Whoever came by at a particular point was incorporated into whatever it was we were working on. There are, like, six people credited with percussion. For “Zoo Metaphors” we actually tracked it live. Cliff played new-agey music on his guitar while Kira sat on the couch and wailed. Casey and Erica Erdman ran around the house making strange noises, slamming doors, stomping on things, knocking on windows. I have a big metal stop sign that I stole hanging in my house. They took it off the wall and shook it so it sounded like an old, back-stage, thunder sheet. Then Erika took a bag of dried lentil beans and poured them on the stop sign. It sounded like rain. There’s also some Chapman stick on the tape, an a cappella piece with three-part harmony. It actually sold quite well, for an independent record. I think if I kept up with the demand for it and actually took the time to make more copies of it as the existing ones sold, I might’ve made some money. But It’s gone. I don’t have a copy of it anymore. I’ve sold about two hundred and fifty copies in a year.

TW: All self-promotion?

MN: All self-promotion. You have to do a certain amount of self-promotion. And in order to do self-promotion well, you have to be good at what you do. Otherwise, your self-promotion sounds like, smacks of and feels like… self-promotion. But you gotta do it. Nobody is coming around knocking on my door asking for poems. Actually, that’s not true. But people are knocking on my door and asking for poems now because of what I’ve been doing for the past couple of years, which is submit poems to every fucking magazine in the western hemisphere. You can’t get published if you don’t submit. You get rejected a hundred times just to get an acceptance because that’s how you build this. I’ve already been published nationally a few times and I intend to be published nationally on a regular basis, eventually. There’s a systematic and methodical way of going about it. But it’s necessary because the end result is that people start coming to you, soliciting work. That’s a good thing. And that is beginning to happen with me. My work is being requested.

TW: It seems in many of your projects, especially those that involve other people, there’s kind of a mish-mash, hodgepodge sensibility.

MN: I’m more deliberate than that. Susan Heeger of the L.A. Times described me as a “free-associative” after hearing me read “Zoo Metaphors” somewhere. I wish I had the freedom to be free-associative. Ellyn Maybe is free-associative. Perhaps Scott Wannberg is free-associative. I’m not. I took an enormous amount of time making “Zoo Metaphors” work. The editing process — I worked on it for three months before I even read it anywhere. That’s this hodge-podge you are referring to. It seems accidental, but it’s not.

TW: Do you write poetry with one eye on the stage?

MN: I try very hard to compose work that works on the page and works in a performance. Occasionally I create something that works better on paper. And vice versa. Those are my failures. I have a piece called “The Chair” that reads terribly well. Goose bumps in the audience. Really not a very good poem. Then I have a piece called “Winter” that is very well constructed. Very academic, actually. Looks brilliant on the page, but every time I’ve read it out loud, it’s died. Neither one is really that good because they need to work in both contexts. “Zoo Metaphors” works both ways.

TW: So is the common denominator accessibility?

MN: Accessibility is an interesting idea. My emotional intent must be accessible for me to consider that I’ve done something successful. It’s been argued that my work is not accessible because I don’t use universal references all the time. I think that’s too narrow of a view. I would prefer poetry that has some mystery to it while imparting its tone, rather than poetry that spells everything out. In a poem of mine called, “I thought I would miss the rapture on my knees,” I use some very specific Biblical references. When I say, “I thought I would miss the rapture on my knees,” I mean that literally. People have thought that that’s symbolic for other things. That’s fine. As long as they get the tone. It literally means, I, from my fundamentalist Christian background, being engaged in this homosexual experience right now, if the Rapture happens — which is Jesus coming back to earth, claiming the saved, to catch them up into heaven and take them away before the Great Tribulation, blah, blah, blah — if Jesus comes back right now, I ain’t gonna go. A good 75% of my audience have not the slightest idea of what I’m talking about. If they’ve ever heard the word “rapture,” they aren’t cognizant of that very specific context. But because it’s real and truthful in fact, it’s also real and truthful in tone. So delivering that poem I can impart a sense of what I was feeling, which is guilt and regret and stuff like that. If people don’t know what the Rapture is, big deal. It doesn’t matter. In my other career as a pop music writer and singer, I’m not signed with a great big smashing record label because I’m not writing for the lowest common denominator. I’m trying to find a point where what we do can be accessible, but it doesn’t have to pander to “oh baby, baby, baby…” I believe that it’s possible to create intelligent art and expect and demand your audience be intelligent to know what you’re doing and to follow you. Without being erudite and too academic for your own good. And if there is a movement in Los Angeles at all, it’s that people whose work I respect — S. A Griffin, Scott Wannberg, Laurel Ann Bogen, Ellyn Maybe, Nelson Gary, Pam Ward, Nancy Agabian — they’re doing that. They are not coming down to “ooh baby, baby, baby… ” They’re not doing sex poetry just so they can say “fuck” so everybody in the open reading will titter along. They’re doing real honest work that is accessible because they’re telling the truth.

I thought I would miss the rapture on my knees

by Matthew Niblock

I thought I would sing hosannas.
I thought I would see the faces of the choirboy
in my sleep, his many faces. I thought I
would burrow down in feathers. I
thought I would find a map.
I thought I would be piercing with
eyelashes and treble clefs, setting straight the shadows
at vacation bible schools and singing choirboy hymns to his
tender skin and chaste brow. I thought
I would die there, then, touching him;
and his throated hum clenched in
my fists, my hands wringing dry his sweat.
I thought I would miss the rapture on my knees.
I thought I would bubble over with wedding songs and
show-and-tell melodies, whispering the words:
if Jesus still loves me I might still sing.

but I am not fourteen anymore.

Reprinted from God the motion picture C 1994, Dance of the Iguana Press